Women’s sexual liberation brings changes how we see relationships

Amid Bennaim | Staff Writer

opinion@fiusm.com

It used to be that a man had to pick up his date at her parents house, get to meet the family and probably go through some sort of awkward experience. The woman would usually wait for marriage before sex, except for the lucky guys who got some action after becoming committed to a relationship with her. Then came birth control and free love. Once millions of women began having casual sex, everything changed and eventually free love became a tool for women to emancipate themselves from the chains of old customs and to help raise their status to men’s equal.

Ironically, this tool of emancipation has taken something very important away from women.

Besides the obvious problems of STDs and teenage mothers, there was a change in the dynamic of the relationship between men and women. Before the era of free love, men courted women. They were willing to go through the awkward family visit, to wait for sex, to be gentlemanly, and to do anything that they needed to win over the heart of the woman that he liked, but no more.

Now that sex is free, it has become very rare to find a man that is willing to go through the hoops for a woman. A cynic might believe this to be a sort of folly of men, but in reality it is the new field that the game is being played in. If one is stranded on a deserted island, slowly dehydrating, he would likely go for the lowest hanging coconut, the one that is easiest to acquire. The problem is that women are at a disadvantage in this game.

When it comes down to it, very few men want to marry the lowest hanging fruit. The men that do are likely low hanging fruits themselves. Perhaps, as a throwback to how things used to be, men value women that are not easily accessible. This means that men wouldn’t likely marry a girl who has had many partners in the past. While many women hate to hear this, women also have a shorter biological clock than men. What that means is that women have less of a time to experiment with free love than men, and once they are ready to settle down they have a shorter time to find a partner to raise a family with.

What the big picture shows is that now it’s the men who have the power when it comes to choosing a partner. While it might be unfair, society puts a higher value on women’s prudeness than that of men. As long as men are not hurt by sexual experience, they  get to judge women using a different system than women use on them. Since the society values prudeness greatly, a good woman can easily fall short. On top of this, a man can take his time to look for the right partner because he can reproduce and have a family until a much later age. Not only can he look for longer, but he can look for younger women that have the qualities that he wants in a wife. While an older woman can also look for a younger man, she still has to marry at a relatively young age if she wants to bear more than one child.

While this is the current state of affairs, it is not something that is written in stone. Looking further into the past, men arranged marriages for women, so the situation of a man having the power to chose his wife as opposed to the vice versa is more old than new (which is ironic). That being said, it is sad. As a man, I feel great sorrow for the loss of chivalry. It has now become common for men not to behave like a gentleman and to be disrespectful to women.

The future is still a mystery. Perhaps one day, society will not look down upon women who have had active sexual lives. There could also be further advances in medicine that would allow women to have children at a later age and destroy the biological clock. In the short term, both men and women should be more selective, because one-night-stands and friends with benefits are a sign of short-sightedness and do little to help us develop as people.

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